“The time when Israeli aircraft come and bombard parts of Lebanon is over,” he warned. “I say to the Israeli army along the border: from tonight be ready and wait for us.”

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri, an opponent of Hezbollah, said the “new aggression” by Israel constituted “a threat to regional stability and an attempt to push the situation towards further tension”.

Hassan Nasrallah also said the Israeli air strikes south-west of the Syrian capital, Damascus, on Saturday had hit a Hezbollah rest house and not a military facility.

An Israeli military spokesman said the strikes had thwarted a plan by the Quds Force, the overseas operations arm of Iran’s Islamic Revolution Guard Corps (IRGC) and allied Shia militias to launch a number of attack drones loaded with explosives at targets in northern Israel.

Israel has been so concerned by what it calls Iran’s “military entrenchment” in Syria and shipments of Iranian weapons to Hezbollah that it has conducted hundreds of air strikes in an attempt to thwart them since 2011.

Meanwhile in Iraq, the powerful Iranian-backed paramilitary Popular Mobilisation force again accused Israel of what it said was a drone attack near the Syrian border in Anbar province on Sunday that killed two of its members.